Hepatitis C Treatment in Liver Transplant Recipients
In the June 2007 Journal of Hepatology, M. Angelico and colleagues reported data from a randomized trial of pegylated interferon alfa-2a (Pegasys) monotherapy versus Pegasys plus ribavirin in 42 non-cirrhotic liver transplant recipients with recurrent hepatitis C; participants were treated for 48 weeks. In an intention-to-treat analysis, early virological response (EVR, defined as an HCV RNA decrease of at least 2 logs at week 12) occurred in 76% of the monotherapy patients and 71% of those in the combination therapy group. Sustained virological response (SVR, defined as undetectable HCV RNA 24 weeks after completion of therapy) was achieved in 38% and 33%, respectively. EVR had positive predictive values for SVR of 50% and 47%, respectively, and none of the patients who failed to achieve EVR went on to become sustained responders. Six patients in the monotherapy group and seven in the combination therapy group discontinued treatment prematurely, while seven and eight subjects, respectively, required Pegasys dose reduction. The researchers concluded that Pegasys, with or without ribavirin, led to sustained response in one-third of transplant recipients with recurrent hepatitis C, adding that, “The low SVR rate is mainly due to inability to sustain full doses of antivirals and lack of the booster effect of ribavirin.”
Ursodeoxycholic Acid for Liver Inflammation
Many patients with hepatitis C – especially those with genotype 1 – fail to achieve SVR with interferon-based therapy, and could thus benefit from treatments that reduce liver inflammation and fibrosis. As reported in the June 25, 2007 advance online edition of Gut, M. Omata and colleagues assessed the effect of oral ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) on serum biomarkers in nearly 600 prior non-responders with elevated ALT levels; participants were randomly assigned to receive UDCA at doses of 150, 600, or 900 mg/day for 24 weeks. Levels of the liver enzymes ALT, AST, and GGT decreased by week 4, then remained constant for the remainder of the drug-administration period. All three biomarkers decreased significantly less in the 150 mg/day arm compared with the two higher dose groups. While overall changes in ALT and AST did not differ between the 600 and 900 mg/day groups, GGT was significantly lower in the 900 mg/day group; however, ALT decreased significantly more in the 900 mg/day group among patients whose baseline GGT level exceeded 80 IU/L. Adverse events were reported by 19% of the patients in all three dose groups, and serum HCV RNA levels did not change in any group. “A 600 mg/day UDCA dose was optimal to decrease ALT and AST levels in chronic hepatitis C patients,” the researchers concluded. “The 900 mg/day dose decreased GGT levels further, and may be preferable in patients with prevailing biliary injuries.”
Chronic Liver Disease and Cardiovascular Risk
Past studies have produced conflicting evidence regarding the prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors in people with chronic hepatitis C. As reported in the June 2007 Journal of Hepatology, G. Targher and colleagues analyzed carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) – a measure of the health of the carotid arteries in the neck, and an early indicator of atherosclerosis – in 35 patients with chronic hepatitis B, 60 with chronic hepatitis C, 60 with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and 60 healthy control subjects. Carotid IMT measurements were lowest in the healthy controls, intermediate in patients with HBV or HCV, and highest in those with NASH. These differences were minimally affected by adjustment for age, sex, body mass index, smoking, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels, insulin resistance, and presence of the metabolic syndrome. “These data suggest that NASH, HCV, and HBV are strongly associated with early atherosclerosis independent of classical risk factors,” the investigators concluded.
Treatment in HIV/HCV Coinfected Patients
Two recent studies assessed response to hepatitis C treatment in patients with HIV/HCV coinfection, a population that typically does not respond as well to interferon-based therapy. As reported in the May 15, 2007 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, C.M. Behler and colleagues assessed whether interferon and/or ribavirin dose modification due to side effects, or the use of hematopoietic growth factors, influenced treatment outcomes in the ACTG A5071 study. A total of 133 coinfected participants were randomly assigned to receive ribavirin plus either conventional interferon or Pegasys for 48 weeks. Doses were modified in patients with adverse events including hematological toxicity (e.g., anemia or neutropenia), and growth factors were administered as needed (e.g., erythropoietin for anemia, G-CSF for neutropenia). Patients treated with Pegasys were more likely to require dose reduction or treatment discontinuation than those treated with conventional interferon. The majority of interferon dose reductions were due to neutropenia, while most ribavirin dose reductions were due to anemia. The incidence of side effects did not differ with regard to CD4 cell count or the use of antiretroviral therapy – including AZT (Retrovir), which is known to cause anemia. Participants who underwent dose modification for any reason were significantly less likely to achieve SVR and/or histological response. Hematological toxicity itself was not directly linked with clinical outcomes, but use of hematopoietic growth factors was associated with increased SVR and histological response rates. “Dose modifications for anti-HCV therapy may adversely affect the outcome of treatment of HCV in individuals who are coinfected with HIV,” the investigators concluded, adding that, “The use of hematopoietic growth factor support may be associated with an improved clinical response to therapy.”
Importance of Adequate Ribavirin
In the second study, reported in the June 2007 Journal of Viral Hepatitis, B. Ramos and colleagues analyzed the relationship between ribavirin dose and treatment outcomes among HIV/HCV coinfected patients in three trials. In the Spanish PRESCO study, coinfected patients received Pegasys plus 1000-1200 mg/day weight-based ribavirin. In the PISG trial, HIV negative subjects were treated with the same regimen. In the Pegasys combination therapy arm of the pivotal APRICOT trial, coinfected patients received a fixed dose of 800 mg/day ribavirin. Among genotype 1 patients, rates of rapid virological response (RVR, defined as undetectable HCV RNA at week 4) were 33.3% in PRESCO, 31.2% in PISG, and 13% in APRICOT. For patients with genotypes 2 or 3, the corresponding RVR rates were 83.7%, 84.2%, and 37%. Both RVR and EVR rates were similar in the two studies that used the higher weight-based ribavirin dose, but lower in the trial that used the lower fixed dose, leading the researchers to conclude that, “Prescription of high ribavirin doses enhances the early virological response to HCV therapy in HCV/HIV coinfected patients, with results approaching those seen in HCV-monoinfected patients.”
By: Liz Highleyman
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Facing The Islamic Menace
Facing the Islamist Menace
Christopher Hitchens
Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s main concern: the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.
I might quibble about Steyn’s assessment—Amis has written brilliantly about Mohammed Atta’s death cult, for example, while Jack Straw made one of the best presentations to the UN of the case for liberating Iraq. But it’s more useful to point out two things that have happened between the writing of this admirably tough-minded book and its publication. Jack Straw, now the leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women who came to his office wearing veils. The speech catalyzed a long-postponed debate not just on the veil but on the refusal of assimilation that it symbolizes. It seems to have swung the Labour Party into a much firmer position against what I call one-way multiculturalism. Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the shift with a December speech emphasizing the “duty” of immigrants to assimilate to British values. And Martin Amis, speaking to the London Times, had this to say:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
I know both of these men to be profoundly humanistic and open-minded. Straw has defended the rights of immigrants all his life and loyally represents a constituency with a large Asian population. Amis has rebuked me several times in print for supporting the intervention in Iraq, the casualties of which have become horrifying to him. Even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture either man making critical comments about Islamic dress, let alone using terms such as “deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine].
As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.
Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism. But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)
Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who, like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an impression of something unstoppable.
Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July 2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.
The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish.
Steyn cannot seem to make up his mind about the defense of secularism in this struggle. He regards Christianity as a bulwark of civilization and a possible insurance against Islamism. But he cannot resist pointing out that most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another “faith community,” agreeing with them on the need for confessional-based schooling, and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism.
This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the saving tactic of wit.
I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity of September 11 set back the Islamist project of a “soft” conquest of host countries, Muslim countries included. Up until 9/11, the Talibanization of Pakistan—including the placement of al-Qaida sympathizers within its nuclear program—proceeded fairly smoothly. Official Pakistani support for Muslim gangsters operating in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India went relatively unpunished. Saudi funds discreetly advanced the Wahhabist program, through madrassa-building and a network of Islamic banking, across the globe. In the West, Muslim demands for greater recognition and special treatment had become an accepted part of the politically correct agenda. Some denounced me as cynical for saying at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the nature and urgency of the Islamist threat, but I still think I was right. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had to trim their sails a bit. The Taliban will at least never be able to retake power by stealth or as a result of our inattention. Millions have become aware of the danger—including millions of Shi’a Muslims who now see the ideology of bin Laden and Zarqawi as a menace to their survival. Groups and cells that might have gotten away with murder have wound up unmasked and shut down, from Berlin to Casablanca.
Of course, these have not been the only consequences of September 11 and its aftermath. Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.
Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime” and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”) is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.
Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument, in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the following:
1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.
Christopher Hitchens
Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s main concern: the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.
I might quibble about Steyn’s assessment—Amis has written brilliantly about Mohammed Atta’s death cult, for example, while Jack Straw made one of the best presentations to the UN of the case for liberating Iraq. But it’s more useful to point out two things that have happened between the writing of this admirably tough-minded book and its publication. Jack Straw, now the leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women who came to his office wearing veils. The speech catalyzed a long-postponed debate not just on the veil but on the refusal of assimilation that it symbolizes. It seems to have swung the Labour Party into a much firmer position against what I call one-way multiculturalism. Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the shift with a December speech emphasizing the “duty” of immigrants to assimilate to British values. And Martin Amis, speaking to the London Times, had this to say:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
I know both of these men to be profoundly humanistic and open-minded. Straw has defended the rights of immigrants all his life and loyally represents a constituency with a large Asian population. Amis has rebuked me several times in print for supporting the intervention in Iraq, the casualties of which have become horrifying to him. Even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture either man making critical comments about Islamic dress, let alone using terms such as “deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine].
As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.
Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism. But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)
Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who, like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an impression of something unstoppable.
Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July 2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.
The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish.
Steyn cannot seem to make up his mind about the defense of secularism in this struggle. He regards Christianity as a bulwark of civilization and a possible insurance against Islamism. But he cannot resist pointing out that most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another “faith community,” agreeing with them on the need for confessional-based schooling, and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism.
This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the saving tactic of wit.
I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity of September 11 set back the Islamist project of a “soft” conquest of host countries, Muslim countries included. Up until 9/11, the Talibanization of Pakistan—including the placement of al-Qaida sympathizers within its nuclear program—proceeded fairly smoothly. Official Pakistani support for Muslim gangsters operating in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India went relatively unpunished. Saudi funds discreetly advanced the Wahhabist program, through madrassa-building and a network of Islamic banking, across the globe. In the West, Muslim demands for greater recognition and special treatment had become an accepted part of the politically correct agenda. Some denounced me as cynical for saying at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the nature and urgency of the Islamist threat, but I still think I was right. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had to trim their sails a bit. The Taliban will at least never be able to retake power by stealth or as a result of our inattention. Millions have become aware of the danger—including millions of Shi’a Muslims who now see the ideology of bin Laden and Zarqawi as a menace to their survival. Groups and cells that might have gotten away with murder have wound up unmasked and shut down, from Berlin to Casablanca.
Of course, these have not been the only consequences of September 11 and its aftermath. Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.
Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime” and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”) is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.
Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument, in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the following:
1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.
Facing The Islamic Menace
Facing the Islamist Menace
Christopher Hitchens
Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s main concern: the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.
I might quibble about Steyn’s assessment—Amis has written brilliantly about Mohammed Atta’s death cult, for example, while Jack Straw made one of the best presentations to the UN of the case for liberating Iraq. But it’s more useful to point out two things that have happened between the writing of this admirably tough-minded book and its publication. Jack Straw, now the leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women who came to his office wearing veils. The speech catalyzed a long-postponed debate not just on the veil but on the refusal of assimilation that it symbolizes. It seems to have swung the Labour Party into a much firmer position against what I call one-way multiculturalism. Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the shift with a December speech emphasizing the “duty” of immigrants to assimilate to British values. And Martin Amis, speaking to the London Times, had this to say:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
I know both of these men to be profoundly humanistic and open-minded. Straw has defended the rights of immigrants all his life and loyally represents a constituency with a large Asian population. Amis has rebuked me several times in print for supporting the intervention in Iraq, the casualties of which have become horrifying to him. Even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture either man making critical comments about Islamic dress, let alone using terms such as “deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine].
As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.
Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism. But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)
Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who, like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an impression of something unstoppable.
Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July 2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.
The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish.
Steyn cannot seem to make up his mind about the defense of secularism in this struggle. He regards Christianity as a bulwark of civilization and a possible insurance against Islamism. But he cannot resist pointing out that most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another “faith community,” agreeing with them on the need for confessional-based schooling, and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism.
This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the saving tactic of wit.
I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity of September 11 set back the Islamist project of a “soft” conquest of host countries, Muslim countries included. Up until 9/11, the Talibanization of Pakistan—including the placement of al-Qaida sympathizers within its nuclear program—proceeded fairly smoothly. Official Pakistani support for Muslim gangsters operating in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India went relatively unpunished. Saudi funds discreetly advanced the Wahhabist program, through madrassa-building and a network of Islamic banking, across the globe. In the West, Muslim demands for greater recognition and special treatment had become an accepted part of the politically correct agenda. Some denounced me as cynical for saying at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the nature and urgency of the Islamist threat, but I still think I was right. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had to trim their sails a bit. The Taliban will at least never be able to retake power by stealth or as a result of our inattention. Millions have become aware of the danger—including millions of Shi’a Muslims who now see the ideology of bin Laden and Zarqawi as a menace to their survival. Groups and cells that might have gotten away with murder have wound up unmasked and shut down, from Berlin to Casablanca.
Of course, these have not been the only consequences of September 11 and its aftermath. Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.
Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime” and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”) is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.
Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument, in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the following:
1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.
Christopher Hitchens
Mark Steyn’s new book is a welcome wake-up call.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well. The first is novelist Martin Amis, ridiculed by Steyn for worrying about environmental apocalypse when the threat to civilization is obviously Islamism; the second is Jack Straw, formerly Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, mocked for the soft and conciliatory line he took over the affair of the Danish cartoons. The dazzling fiction writer and the pedestrian social-democratic politician are for Steyn dual exemplars of his book’s main concern: the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.
I might quibble about Steyn’s assessment—Amis has written brilliantly about Mohammed Atta’s death cult, for example, while Jack Straw made one of the best presentations to the UN of the case for liberating Iraq. But it’s more useful to point out two things that have happened between the writing of this admirably tough-minded book and its publication. Jack Straw, now the leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women who came to his office wearing veils. The speech catalyzed a long-postponed debate not just on the veil but on the refusal of assimilation that it symbolizes. It seems to have swung the Labour Party into a much firmer position against what I call one-way multiculturalism. Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the shift with a December speech emphasizing the “duty” of immigrants to assimilate to British values. And Martin Amis, speaking to the London Times, had this to say:
There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
I know both of these men to be profoundly humanistic and open-minded. Straw has defended the rights of immigrants all his life and loyally represents a constituency with a large Asian population. Amis has rebuked me several times in print for supporting the intervention in Iraq, the casualties of which have become horrifying to him. Even five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to picture either man making critical comments about Islamic dress, let alone using terms such as “deportation.” Mark Steyn’s book is essentially a challenge to the bien-pensants among us: an insistence that we recognize an extraordinary threat and thus the possible need for extraordinary responses. He need not pose as if he were the only one with the courage to think in this way.
The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization [italics mine].
As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.
Mark Steyn believes that demography is destiny, and he makes an immensely convincing case. He stations himself at the intersection of two curves. The downward one is the population of developed Europe and Japan, which has slipped or is slipping below what demographers call “replacement,” rapidly producing a situation where the old will far outnumber the young. The upward curve, or curves, represent the much higher birthrate in the Islamic world and among Muslim immigrants to Western societies. Anticipating Harris in a way, Steyn writes:
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
This is a highly reductionist view of the origin and nature of the Bosnian war—it would not account, for example, for Croatian irredentism. But paranoia about population did mutate into Serbian xenophobia and fascism, and a similar consciousness does animate movements like the British National Party and Le Pen’s Front Nationale. (Demographic considerations do not appear to explain the continued addiction of these and similar parties to anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.)
Nor can there be much doubt that the awareness of demography as a potential weapon originates with the Islamists themselves. Anybody who, like me, has publicly criticized Islamism gets used to the accusation that he has “insulted a billion Muslims.” A vague but definite threat underlies this absurd charge, and in parts of Europe it already intimidates politicians. Gilles Kepel, the French scholar of Islam, once told me that when he lectures in North Africa his listeners often ask how many Muslims live in France. If he replies that he believes the official figures to be mostly correct, scornful laughter erupts. The true figure, his listeners say, is much higher. France is on its way to becoming part of the dar-al-Islam. It is leaving the dar-al-Harb (“House of War”), but without a fight. Steyn has no difficulty producing equally minatory public statements from Islamist triumphalists. And, because his argument is exponential, it creates an impression of something unstoppable.
Yet Steyn makes the same mistake as did the late Oriana Fallaci: considering European Muslim populations as one. Islam is as fissile as any other religion (as Iraq reminds us). Little binds a Somali to a Turk or an Iranian or an Algerian, and considerable friction exists among immigrant Muslim groups in many European countries. Moreover, many Muslims actually have come to Europe for the advertised purposes—seeking asylum and to build a better life. A young Afghan man, murdered in the assault on the London subway system in July 2005, had fled to England from the Taliban, which had murdered most of his family. Muslim women often demand the protection of the authorities against forced marriage and other cruelties. These are all points of difference, and also of possible resistance to Euro-sharia.
The main problem in Europe in this context is that many deracinated young Muslim men, inflamed by Internet propaganda from Chechnya or Iraq and aware of their own distance from “the struggle,” now regard the jihadist version of their religion as the “authentic” one. Compounding the problem, Europe’s multicultural authorities, many of its welfare agencies, and many of its churches treat the most militant Muslims as the minority’s “real” spokesmen. As Kenan Malik and others have pointed out in the case of Britain, this mind-set cuts the ground from under the feet of secular Muslims, encouraging the sensation that many in the non-Muslim Establishment have a kind of death wish.
Steyn cannot seem to make up his mind about the defense of secularism in this struggle. He regards Christianity as a bulwark of civilization and a possible insurance against Islamism. But he cannot resist pointing out that most of the Christian churches have collapsed into compromise: choosing to speak of Muslims as another “faith community,” agreeing with them on the need for confessional-based schooling, and reserving their real condemnation for American policies in the war against terrorism.
This is not to deny Steyn’s salient point that demography and cultural masochism, especially in combination, are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization. His gift for the illustrative anecdote and the revealing quotation is evident, and if more people have woken up to the Islamist menace since he began writing about it, then the credit is partly his. Muslims in one part of England demand the demolition of an ancient statue of a wild boar, and in another part of England make plots to blow up airports, buses, and subway trains. The two threats are not identical. But they are connected, and Steyn attempts to tease out the filiations with the saving tactic of wit.
I still think—or should I say hope?—that the sheer operatic insanity of September 11 set back the Islamist project of a “soft” conquest of host countries, Muslim countries included. Up until 9/11, the Talibanization of Pakistan—including the placement of al-Qaida sympathizers within its nuclear program—proceeded fairly smoothly. Official Pakistani support for Muslim gangsters operating in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and India went relatively unpunished. Saudi funds discreetly advanced the Wahhabist program, through madrassa-building and a network of Islamic banking, across the globe. In the West, Muslim demands for greater recognition and special treatment had become an accepted part of the politically correct agenda. Some denounced me as cynical for saying at the time that Osama bin Laden had done us a favor by disclosing the nature and urgency of the Islamist threat, but I still think I was right. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had to trim their sails a bit. The Taliban will at least never be able to retake power by stealth or as a result of our inattention. Millions have become aware of the danger—including millions of Shi’a Muslims who now see the ideology of bin Laden and Zarqawi as a menace to their survival. Groups and cells that might have gotten away with murder have wound up unmasked and shut down, from Berlin to Casablanca.
Of course, these have not been the only consequences of September 11 and its aftermath. Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.
Steyn ends his book with a somewhat slapdash ten-point program for resistance to Islamism, which includes offhand one-line items such as “End the Iranian regime” and more elaborate proposals to get rid of the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Authority, and (for some reason) NATO. His tenth point (“Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself”) is barely even a makeweight to bring the figure up to ten.
Steyn is much more definite about the cultural side of his argument, in other words, than about the counterterrorist dimension. If I wanted to sharpen both prongs of his thesis, I would also propose the following:
1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
When I read Sam Harris’s irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line, I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Democrat-Gazette
By : Bret Schulte
On a cold January Thursday, an unusual scene unfolded with no great fanfare at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. A man and woman, she in a pink sweat suit and he in jeans and a brown jacket, stepped into the lobby and asked to meet with a representative of the paper. The reason: They wanted to place a classified ad seeking a missing person. And they wanted it to run on Sunday, in the print edition.
Their decision made sense because people in Little Rock read the Sunday paper. (I am one of them, and I worked for the Democrat-Gazette from 1999 to 2001.) While the industry has seen readers leave in droves in markets all over the country — the nearby Dallas Morning News' readership dropped a third from 1998 to 2008 — the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has stayed steady. Over the same period, the paper lost a mere 1 percent of its circulation — now about 196,000 on weekdays and 281,000 on Sunday. In fact, the Democrat-Gazette's city edition has the highest Sunday penetration of any major newspaper in the country, at 63 percent. And by offering free want ads years ago, this paper beat craigslist at its own game before craigslist even had a game.
The Democrat-Gazette has always been considered a perfectly fine regional news outlet. Now the paper, or more specifically, its owner and publisher, Walter E. Hussman Jr., is being hailed as a visionary and as an industry leader. In November, the Atlantic slotted him at No. 14 on its list of 25 "Brave Thinkers." In 2008, Editor & Publisher named him "Publisher of the Year."
His brave thought is simple: Protect the value of your product. When his paper launched its Web site, it followed the industry lead and gave everything away online. "People started coming up to me saying, 'I really appreciate you putting up that content for free. I don't have to subscribe to your newspaper anymore,' " Hussman says. "I thought this was crazy. We're teaching them they don't have to subscribe to the paper." So in 2002, he erected a pay wall around the site. Print subscribers get free access; everyone else has to pony up $5.95 a month. And for the next several years, when most other news organizations were dreaming up ways to monetize the new platform, Hussman focused on expanding the circulation of the retro old print product. "I think for a long time there people kind of laughed at us and thought we were kind of stupid for what we were doing," Hussman says.
Nowadays, Hussman is looking pretty smart, and not just because his notion of charging for online content is now in vogue. He's the owner of a sizable media empire — a newspaper chain that includes the Little Rock paper and the Chattanooga Times Free Press as well as several small dailies and weeklies in Arkansas and nearby states — all under the umbrella of Wehco Media. And he's ready to expand his print holdings: Hussman recently attempted to buy the Austin American-Statesman, but the effort collapsed when the owner, Cox, decided not to sell the paper.
He considers himself equal parts businessman and newspaperman — a handy hybrid for these troubled times. And while his paper is suffering like everyone else's, his defiantly print-centric focus in the Internet Age has buffered the blows.
For the past few years, the Democrat-Gazette has consistently performed better than its peers. In the third quarter of 2009, the industry average for ad revenue was down 28 percent. The Democrat-Gazette was down about half that. Because it is privately owned, the paper doesn't have to disclose its profit margin — and it doesn't. Asked about it, Paul Smith, president of Wehco Newspapers, replied, "Profits decreased significantly over the last couple years, but we are still profitable." He added that 2009 turned out to be a better year than executives had expected — the company provided Christmas bonuses, which had been in doubt — and he expects 2010 to be pretty similar, with the wild card being the price of newsprint.
The Democrat-Gazette has trimmed its staff — the newsroom roster is now 167, 10 of them part time — but the carnage has not been as severe as at some other newspapers. Hussman has sliced 10 percent of the Democrat-Gazette's editorial staff since the big newspaper shakeout began in 2007. Other papers have shed 30 percent and more. Some have shut down.
The Web strategy was not the first time Hussman defied conventional wisdom and came out on top. The Arkansas native and scion of one of the state's oldest newspaper families has a famous contrarian streak — one that lurks under a huge grin, a modest personality and an old-fashioned courtesy. "He's so darned polite. He's so darned nice," Smith says. "There are a lot of aggressive people. Walter is the most dangerous kind, because you never know he's very aggressive."
Hussman showed just how aggressive he can be in 1991, when he stunned the news industry by bringing the mighty Gannett empire to its knees in a fabled newspaper war in Little Rock. Gannett ended the bloody battle by selling Hussman the beloved Arkansas Gazette, which he then merged with his own paper, the Democrat. Later that decade, he moved into Chattanooga, which also had a competitive market, snatched up one of the papers, and then pushed enough money at his rivals to persuade them to sell as well. Those rivals, by the way, were hardly cash-strapped. They were members of the Ochs family, of New York Times fame. Hussman recently ended another newspaper war in northwest Arkansas after gobbling up two local papers and merging on his own terms with a third paper, the Morning News, owned by the Stephens family, one of the few Arkansas families with more money than Hussman. Put simply, Hussman doesn't lose. His aggression has a lot to do with it, but so does his restraint.
At lunch, eagerly sopping up salad dressing with Melba toast, Hussman hardly seems fierce. He looks more like an English professor than a hard-charging executive, preferring corduroy pants and a tweed blazer to a power suit. But make no mistake, Hussman is very wealthy. In 2001 the weekly Arkansas Business estimated his net worth at $890 million; Hussman says the actual figure is much lower today. He drives a snazzy Mercedes, and he lunches at the Little Rock Club, a private establishment that is 30 floors in the air and offers stunning vistas to the city's elite.
In an age of razzle-dazzle executives, corporate shareholders and global media, he is an anachronism: an old-money, local publisher who believes in traditional news values. He keeps his office at the Democrat-Gazette, a squat box of a building that used to be a YMCA. He is notoriously frugal: His office is large but filled with worn furniture, including a '60s vintage couch that serves as an open-air, horizontal filing cabinet. The best part of his day, he says, is proofing the paper's stridently conservative editorial page. Hussman is also invested in his community, and while he's hardly universally beloved, he is active in civic groups and is a crusader for education reform in the state.
Because Hussman owns 100 percent of the company's voting stock, he answers to no one. He takes staggering risks and has absorbed equally staggering losses to prevail in his business endeavors. "Walter has succeeded because people always underestimated him," says Griffin Smith, the Democrat-Gazette's executive editor. At 63, Hussman remains a dangerous, and perhaps still underestimated, foe. Even as the industry seems to be collapsing, Hussman wants more newspapers. That has left many people wondering what he knows that they don't.
This is what Hussman knows: The Democrat-Gazette works because "we've always had a really large newshole. We've always had a larger than normal staff. It sounds simple but the reason people buy and read newspapers is there's news in it. And if you have more news in it, more interesting news, more relevant news, news with more context, news with more details, people are going to feel a greater affinity for the paper and they're going to be more likely to renew their subscription and your circulation will be greater."
Hussman keeps it simple. He believes in investing money in his Web site, but it's not his primary focus. Circulation is key, he argues, because it allows you to charge more and make more from print advertising, which is still where most of the money is. Early on, Hussman saw the online model of advertising offering at most $6 to $8 per thousand readers, often half that. On the other hand, there is print.
"Every single Sunday, Best Buy is going to have an ad in the Sunday paper, and they're going to pay somewhere around $40 a thousand," Hussman says. "Why wouldn't they take those ads and run them online? The fact is they get results from that print ad they run in the paper." So Hussman pushed print, partly by opening a theater of battle in northwest Arkansas. His company president, Paul Smith, says, "I think one of the biggest problems in newspaper companies today is people in those companies have decided that newspapers are dying." Obviously, he and Hussman have decided differently. And today, their paper in Little Rock has a bigger circulation than dailies in Memphis, Cincinnati and Miami.
It's tempting to dismiss Hussman as simply out of step or intractable. But people who know him say he'll try anything to see what works, which has been his formula for success. At the request of editors at the Chattanooga Times Free Press, he's letting them experiment with free access to their Web site to see if they can find other ways of generating revenue online. Hussman is toying with the idea of allowing readers to donate to his reporters — essentially an online tip jar, an idea the Miami Herald recently tried and quickly scrapped — to motivate his staff.
Early in his war with the Gazette, he did the unthinkable by risking the loss of millions in revenue by giving away classifieds. He gambled that the boost in circulation would be worth it. He was right. Even after he merged the Democrat and the Gazette, he still offered free classifieds but in limited number. That means spots quickly fill up. If you're too impatient to wait, you can pay to get the ad in immediately. The "free" want ads policy is now earning his paper $2 million a year.
Hussman also eschews national aggregators like Cars.com and Apartments.com, which he argues have trained readers to turn away from local newspaper classifieds and drains them as a source of revenue. Hussman has instead been an outspoken advocate of newspaper collaboration. But despite the bully pulpit of the Associated Press board of directors, on which he long served, his pleas went largely unheeded. So he's moved forward on his own. Recently, the Democrat-Gazette joined forces with the Oklahoman in Oklahoma City to combine their classifieds and offer greater choices to regional readers.
Even with Hussman's myriad ideas, his basic business plan still comes down to people's willingness to buy and read news printed on paper. And that model has plenty of doubters. Hussman's strategy "cannot save the Arkansas paper if print volume and print advertising continue to decline at the pace it is now," says Ed Atorino, a media analyst at The Benchmark Company. Naysayers argue that Hussman is able to rely on an old business model because Arkansas is behind the times. Hussman counters that Little Rock is a typical midsize American city in terms of per capita income and household sales. But the fact remains that for all the buzz about Hussman, few papers have followed the same path when it comes to charging for news online (the Wall Street Journal is a notable exception). In the past year, however, pay walls have attracted a great deal of interest as a way to help save newspapers, and the New York Times announced in January that it would start charging for online content in 2011.
Hussman won't go so far as to say he's sure he's right. After lunch, it's not too long after he laid out his analysis of the industry's woes and his pay wall solution that he blurts out, "This may be wrong, though! I mean, we got to keep an open mind! Maybe we're all going to be free [on the Web] at some time!"
The decorous Hussman grew up in the conservative, tightly knit Southern town of Camden, Arkansas, about a hundred miles south of Little Rock. The Presbyterian Church was a focal point of community life, and Hussman's family, particularly his mother, Betty, were active members. Walter was the youngest of three children and the only boy. People who knew him as a youngster say he was smart, reserved and serious.
Walter's maternal grandfather, Clyde Palmer, was a newspaper pioneer in south Arkansas and a local legend. While honeymooning with his bride in 1909, Palmer stopped in Texarkana for a night, decided to stay and purchased a newspaper. In what would become a family trait, Palmer bested his Texarkana competitors and consolidated them. Over the next few decades, he expanded his holdings to several towns in the region.
Walter's father took over and expanded the family business in 1957. Considered a no-nonsense businessman, Walter Hussman Sr. also exhibited the family's characteristic good manners. On one occasion, he agreed to allow an upstart competitor who had launched a weekly newspaper to use the services of his Camden newspaper's press. The new rival was a young man named David Pryor, whose mother was a close friend of Walter Hussman Sr.'s wife. Even with Hussman Sr.'s help, the paper didn't last long.
"Mr. Hussman was smart enough to know that with a daily newspaper in town, 95 percent of all ads would go to him every time," Pryor says. "And that was the case. It was just a matter of time." But favors from the Hussman family only went so far. When Pryor, a Democrat, launched his political career, which eventually took him to the Arkansas governor's office and the U.S. Senate, he got little help from Hussman's papers. Pryor posits this was because his politics were more liberal than the Hussmans'. "I don't know if any of their papers ever endorsed me," he says. "At that time I felt like I was not getting a proper shake. In retrospect they could have been a lot rougher on me, if they had wanted to."
Young Walter attended an elite prep school, Lawrenceville, in New Jersey, whose notable alumni include Michael Eisner, Randolph A. Hearst and Huey Lewis(!). Hussman's classmate Howard Kelsey recalls him as sociable and as someone who enjoyed competition. They both went to the University of North Carolina, where Hussman majored in journalism. Hussman "was always up to something," Kelsey says. "He didn't stay in his room." Back then, students were not allowed to have cars, and Hussman and Kelsey, who were suitemates, had a long walk to class. In a move that perhaps portended Hussman's knack for problem-solving, he bought himself a scooter and thereby swerved around the rules. "That [solution] became pretty popular," Kelsey says. "If there was a problem, he would fix it."
Hussman earned an MBA from Columbia University and worked briefly for Forbes magazine before coming back to the small towns of south Arkansas in 1970 to help out with the family business. Four years later, interested in a new opportunity and craving a metropolitan area, Hussman persuaded his reluctant father to buy the Arkansas Democrat, a conservative-minded afternoon daily in Little Rock that by most accounts was near death. Its liberal and somber rival was the Arkansas Gazette, owned by another local newspaper family, the Pattersons. It dominated advertising and had double the circulation of the Democrat. At age 27, Hussman became the Democrat's publisher. "I thought it would be an exciting challenge," Hussman says. "It turned out to be more of a challenge than we thought."
Hussman determined that for the Democrat to be successful it had to get down to basics: increasing circulation to increase advertising. He enlarged the newshole and hired more staff. But he didn't gain any readers. He then proposed a joint operating agreement with the Gazette that would guarantee his paper just enough revenue to keep breathing. The Gazette refused. So Hussman got creative.
He hired a bombastic and battle-hungry former AP Little Rock bureau chief named John Robert Starr to lead the newsroom — and as it turned out, wage a nasty ideological war with the Gazette (among other targets) that lasted for years in a regular column. While his personality couldn't have been more different from Hussman's, it gave the paper a voice and persona it desperately needed to attract readers.
It was then that Hussman decided to offer free want ads — an idea he borrowed from the Winnipeg Tribune — recognizing they would be popular with readers. It did wonders to boost his paper's profile. He also allowed big advertisers to duplicate their Gazette ads in his paper for a nominal fee so that readers would see the same sales and specials advertised in the Democrat. Hussman was notoriously thrifty, and veterans of the paper in those days recall fights for office supplies and available telephones. In 1986, the Pattersons caved and sold the paper to Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in America. As everyone knew, Gannett didn't lose newspaper wars. "They had $40 to every $1 of ours," says Paul Smith.
Smith, who was with Hussman as a top executive throughout the war with the Gazette, says he's rarely seen his boss get mad. But one occasion stands out, and it demonstrates Hussman's knack for brinksmanship. Soon after Gannett came to Little Rock, the Democrat planned a promotion that asked readers to vote for their favorite radio disc jockey by buying a newspaper, filling out a ballot and sending it in. The winning DJ would get $10,000 donated to the charity of his or her choice.
A few days before the promotion was set to launch, the Gazette launched a similar promotion, offering the winning DJ a Pontiac Fiero. "They had stolen the idea," Smith says. Hussman summoned his executives to demand answers. He wadded up the Gazette, threw it against the wall and announced the Democrat was not going to roll over. He said, "We're going to give away a Porsche!" And a lucky reader would get a Mercedes. Both promotions went forward, but when DJs on the air lobbied for votes, they would say, "If you only have one quarter, buy a copy of the Democrat. I'd rather drive a Porsche than a Fiero!"
When Gannett offered free classifieds to rival the Democrat's, Hussman decided to make the war about service. He hired new operators, extended the hours of operation every day and opened the office on Saturday. He also had a secretary call the Gazette classifieds line hourly to time how long it took for someone to pick up. The secretary did the same for the Democrat. Before long, Hussman says, it took three or four seconds to get a response from his paper; the Gazette took three or four minutes. His relentlessness eventually convinced Gannett shareholders that the battle wasn't worth the Little Rock market. In 1991, the mighty newspaper chain surrendered and sold to Hussman. No one knows how much he spent winning that war; some local industry experts estimate $200 million to $250 million. Hussman doesn't talk about it. He talks about the fact that he won.
The Democrat-Gazette today is, like its owner, something of an anachronism. Hussman is succeeding by sticking with traditional newspaper values. Though it has cut its book review section and slashed other features pages, the Democrat-Gazette is still stuffed with news. On Sunday, it prints two news sections, the second focused primarily on international news. Hussman continues to subscribe to multiple wire services, and his wire editor regularly weaves together reports on national and international news from the New York Times, Washington Post, AP and other sources to give readers as many facts as possible in a single story. Hussman believes that this is the sort of thing that gives legacy media an advantage over the Internet and keeps readers coming back, as opposed to the prevailing wisdom that papers must go local, local, local.
The Democrat-Gazette's front page routinely features stories that readers could get online from other sources. "When newspapers get away from the traditional model and start having giant stories about the parks or something on the front page," Hussman says, "I think readers start to question what's going on with their news judgment."
The wounds from the newspaper war have not healed in Arkansas. The Gazette was the dominant paper for decades because it was beloved by many, particularly liberals. It won two Pulitzers for its coverage of and editorials on the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957. Its editorial page was as unapologetically left-wing as the Democrat-Gazette's is now right-wing. Ernest Dumas, who was a reporter and editorial writer for the Gazette, was one of scores who lost their jobs when the paper folded. Today, he says, "I don't think much of the Democrat, but I think [Hussman] has spent money probably more generously than certainly Gannett would have to try to maintain a good paper."
Recently, Dumas took a trip to San Francisco, where he regularly read the Chronicle. "I suspect on a daily basis there is at least three times as much news in the Democrat-Gazette than there is in the Chronicle," he says, "and that's true across the country."
Joel Gambill, chairman of the journalism department at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, watched the Democrat and the Gazette duke it out from his perch in the northeast corner of the state. He questions whether the Democrat-Gazette today can truly call itself a statewide paper, as it provides little coverage and has few subscribers in his region. "If you compare it to 10 years ago, it doesn't cover the state nearly as thoroughly," Gambill says. "But for what other papers are doing today, I think it still does a good job. It has more international and national news than almost any other paper I look at."
Hussman says the old-fashioned values extend to the proverbial wall that separates news coverage from business interests or political inclinations. He acknowledges that as a local owner, he gets leaned on by powerful interests in the community for favors. His response is that he doesn't control the news operation. Reporters say they respect him and are grateful to work for a local publisher who has sheltered their place of business from financial ruin. But while his top editors and executives have stood by his side for decades, Hussman doesn't seem to inspire the same devotion among the rank and file. In 2009, the paper implemented mandatory furloughs. The move no doubt saved jobs, but it also hurt reporters' incomes, already considered low.
Executive Editor Griffin Smith says Hussman is an ideal owner who is accessible but who stays out of newsroom affairs. Hussman will, however, suggest looking at stories from particular angles. Smith says that "when [Hussman] gets a hold of something, sometimes we have a hard time telling him there's nothing there."
Hussman's willfulness manifests itself in other ways, such as not allowing members of the news staff to have company credit cards. In 1996, the Democrat-Gazette planned to cover President Bill Clinton's reelection campaign, but all expenses had to be charged. Hussman wouldn't waver. Finally, Griffin Smith went to then-General Manager Paul Smith. After some time, Paul Smith came back with a credit card number and said, effectively, guard this with your life. "Years later, I found out Paul had just given me his own credit card number," Griffin Smith says. "The company hadn't relented."
After all these years of newspapering, Hussman sometimes thinks about retirement. He has children who are perhaps interested in getting into the business. A college-age daughter is now interning at the San Francisco Chronicle. His 26-year-old son is working for him in Little Rock. The top brass at Wehco, which has been with him for decades, has recently started to groom their replacements. But Hussman is hesitant to dwell much on the subject.
Sweet, stinging look at a swarm of issues
Sweet, stinging look at a swarm of issues
By Sara Veal
In this information age, we are all aware of the world’s horrors. Villages razed to the ground, in the name of oil. Starving, swollen-bellied children too frail to brush away the flies that feast on them.
We’ve read these stories in newspapers, watched these images on television. Maybe even seen or experienced them firsthand. Unfortunately this deluge of poignant sights and sounds tends to have a desensitizing effect. It’s hard to think of the sea of sadness as consisting of individuals.
Chris Cleaves’ Little Bee, the follow-up to his best-selling debut Incendiary, turns up the volume of one of the voices among these masses – that of a Nigerian 16-year-old girl who seeks asylum in the UK. He pairs her with her superficially polar opposite – an upper-middle-class Englishwoman – and builds around the two women an affecting, often humorous tale that never sinks under the weight of the heavy matters it addresses.
To even basically summarize the plot of Little Bee would spoil its magic, so let’s leave it at this: Two women – Little Bee and Sarah Summers – meet on a Nigerian beach, each there due to insurmountable forces. A terrible decision is made and both women’s lives are changed forever. Two years later they meet again, in a quiet, English suburb, and are forced to confront the consequences of that fateful first encounter.
That sounds rather ominous, and indeed, the topics Cleave touches on are no laughing matter. Oil wars, refugees, the failings of the British immigration system, racism, rape, depression, adultery, suicide, murder, death, grief. All can be found between the cheery orange covers of this book. Yet the tone remains hopeful – these issues are mostly implied rather than gratuitously described, which allows the reader to understand the devastation without losing sight of the individuals.
For, first and foremost, Little Bee is a story about people, and Cleave has brought all his characters to life with careful attention to the way they speak and think. Little Bee and Sarah share storytelling duties, in alternating chapters, and it is immediately evident who is telling her story – which becomes their story.
Little Bee is engaging from the first sentence – “Most days I wish I was a British Pound instead of an African girl” – and has a lyrical way with English, intending it to be her defense against her foreign surroundings.
Unfortunately her English can also undermine her, as when she accidentally likens a taxi driver to male genitalia, thinking she is complimenting him on his impressive shock of hair. Little Bee’s cadence reflects her strong spirit; even when she casually considers the myriad of ways that she would kill herself under necessary circumstances, she does not seem self-pitying, only practical. Her attitude is the same as the novel’s: “If I could not smile my situation would be even more serious”.
Sarah, a beautiful woman with a good job as a magazine editor-in-chief and seemingly picture-perfect family, is eloquent, but her precise way with English only highlights her turmoil (“… here I still was, dry-eyed, with the whole house reeking of gin and lilies”).
Cleaves demonstrates that while these women may seem very different, they can connect profoundly – in the way that we as readers can empathize with both of them despite cultural, social and linguistic gulfs. And although the women are sympathetic, neither is a saint, which adds to their realism.
While Little Bee and Sarah have near-perfected their inner and outer composure, Sarah’s 4-year-old son Charlie aka Batman, is the raw emotional core of the novel, voicing and acting out his feelings with abandon, whether sadness or euphoria, in a childish chatter that enriches the novel’s linguistic melody. He provides some of the most uplifting moments, and a few of the most heart-rending.
Nuanced characterization extends to minor characters, who never act as you would expect. There are no real villains in this story, besides circumstances and political systems. “Simple” farmers are compassionate towards illegal immigrants, offering food and shelter, at risk to themselves. Sarah’s well-educated lover immediately jumps to conclusions about Little Bee’s intentions, in line with the inherent problems with the British immigration system for which he works. Even the most obviously sinister character, a ruthless Nigerian gang leader, displays humanity.
The narrative reads effortlessly although it quickly switches between the past, present and future, circling around the full disclosure of the pivotal event that first brought Little Bee and Sarah together. When the revelation is finally delivered, it is done so in a masterfully smooth way in which the two women’s perspectives blur and overlap, panoramically conveying the event as if through a swiveling camera.
Names play a key role in the novel, tying into themes of identity, a pertinent matter for refugees attempting to belong in the UK – and for every human being negotiating their place in the world. Little Bee, Sarah and Charlie all have at least two names and a persona for each. Little Bee renames herself as such to distance herself from the past; she toys with another when she considers moving on again. Sarah is Sarah Summers professionally, and Sarah O’Rourke as a wife and mother, roles she tries to compartmentalize. A fellow refugee of Little Bee’s refuses to share her name, finding it risky, and in doing so, seems to lose herself. She becomes like those among the nameless ocean of refugees that can be difficult to distinguish between.
Little Bee is not going to change the world. It may spur you to learn something more about the refugee crisis, even take action. It may not. What it will do is draw you into a world both heartbreaking and comic, with captivating characters, a clever use of language and a positive view of mankind against all the odds.
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